Saturday, March 12, 2005

It's okay to shoot journalists...

...so long as they're Communists. Or at any rate, it appears that rightwingers consider it a mitigating circumstance in a shooting, as evidenced by the fact that so many mention that Julia Sgrena is a not just a journalist, but "Communist journalist." (See Malkin, the WSJ, as well as here, here, here, here, here, here, and one could go on....)

And these people want us to believe they stand for promoting liberal democracy?

I won't bother reading all the links, but like jon the first thing that popped into my head was that if she were a Communist, that would explain why she claimed the marines were trying to kill her (a heroically stupid statement, as if they had been she'd be dead), and that this was most likely the topic of scorn in those posts.

(Which is not to say that all Communists are stupid--my father in law is one--but it would explain the willingness to jump to conclusions in this particular case.)

I did say that the wingjobs for the most part don't actually say that it's okay to kill Communist journalists, but rather that they treat a person's political beliefs as possible mitigating circumstances when judging how bad it is to kill them accidentally. Jon's also right that some of them certainly also invoke Sgrena's Communism in order to question her credibility (which raises a whole other problem, but let's leave that aside), but I stuck to linking to people who suggested a connection between her political beliefs and the legitimacy of shooting her.

But since you wanted a quote, Zak, how about this guy, who headlined his piece, "Italian Communist Journalist shot; Escort Killed: Too bad it wasn’t the other way around." Pretty much a smoking gun (if you'll pardon the metaphor).